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Cons:

Role-playing gamers of a certain vintage are likely to remember The Temple of Elemental Evil adventure for the early Advanced Dungeons & Dragons paper-and-pencil game. It's is widely considered a classic, and many adventurers cut their teeth on it. Those same gamers may also remember the series of "Gold Box" computer RPGs, which many consider to be some of the greatest translations of the paper-and-pencil game to date. Good news: If you remember either of these things fondly, you'll find a lot to like in The Temple of Elemental Evil (ToEE).

Fans of other computer RPGs should be able to slip into ToEE quite easily. At a glance, it appears as your standard isometric view game where you control a party of adventurers and guide them through towns, woodlands, and -- of course -- dungeons. Think Baldur's Gate and you're not too far off the mark. The game lets you start by picking from pre-generated characters or creating your own band of up to five adventurers. Either way, your characters start as bumbling novices and spend the rest of the game progressing through up to ten levels of skill.

Like with other facets of the game, the options you have in creating your party are mind-bogglingly numerous. I happily spent 30 minutes creating my party. The game's adherence to the 3.5 rule set means you get to roll abilities, pick a profession, assign skill points, choose special powers ("feats"), pick spells, and even customize your own appearance.

One of the more interesting twists to the game is that your choice of alignment (i.e., your moral orientation) determines how you will start and finish the game. If you're good, you may be called upon to investigate a missing elven princess and destroy the Temple of Elemental Evil. If you're evil, you may be sent to slaughter the members of a caravan and take over the operation of the same temple. Your alignment also affects the choices you'll get during the game and how it may end.

Rules and Rules and Rules

This discussion of alignment provides a good segue into a topic so important that it deserves its own section: The Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 rules. For many, the big buzz around ToEE is not only that it faithfully re-creates a classic adventure in a new medium, but that it does so using almost the entire new 3.5 rule set. These new rules represent the pinnacle of swords and sorcery role-playing, replete with options for playing the kind of adventurer you've always dreamed of.

There is no order and only chaos in this battle.

And let me tell you, ToEE is very faithful to these new rules. The choices you had to make when creating your characters only expand, branch, and multiply as you progress through the game. You get to choose feats, abilities, skills, and equipment in any combination that the rules will allow, feeling your way through a tangled web of prerequisites, rules, synergies, and restrictions. The end result, though, is that the game is amazingly deep in its capacity for customization and replay.

And that's just developing your character. The ways in which ToEE lets you apply those skills and abilities will really blow your mind. Depending on how you've built and developed any given character, you can pick from over a dozen different actions during combat, overcome obstacles like traps and locks, or interact with non-player characters in different ways. None of this should be unfamiliar to RPG gamers, but it's a matter of magnitude here. This game is very complex.